William DuVall took some time to sit down and chat about his latest collaboration with The Hu and their song “This Is Mongol”. I asked about how the track was put together and he said that it was a very unique challenge.
‘I definitely took it on as a…welcome challenge…fortunately I’ve had a long standing interest in world music, indigenous music from everywhere…so the goal here was to create something that fused with western rock music in a way that would come across seamless….You don’t want people to see the effort, right? You just wanna do it and make it look easy…That was the real challenge here…So in order to satisfy all these objectives it was quite a challenge both artistically and technically too.’
We continued talking about things he’s working on at the moment like his solo album 11.12.21 which was recorded and press to vinyl live in studio. William is most famously known for being the new lead singer of Alice in Chains so I had to ask him wheat the hardest song to perform is, whether it be technically difficult or emotionally difficult. He said this.
‘Well you know there’s a handful where on a given night it will take everything you have and more, you know ‘Rain When I Die’ ‘Love Hate Love’ those are just a couple from the previous incarnation of the group where it’s like these are always gonna be…demanding…you get through those and it’s like ‘Wow that was a journey to get through’…you get through that and you feel like you accomplished something.’
We also talked about the band taking time off in the stretches that they do.
‘It’s a full commitment…I think this is why we take time off, like we are right now, this is why we do it. Because we…always tend to be sort of a law onto ourselves. We don’t comport to a lot of things scheduling wise that a lot of bands sort of have to do. We’re fortunate in that we don’t do that…we take the good and the bad that comes with that too…’
All in all a very interesting chat with a very interesting dude!
